About the Young Writers Project
YWP, an independent nonprofit based in Burlington, Vermont, engages young people to write and use digital media to express themselves with clarity and power and to gain confidence and skills for the workplace and life. YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in newspapers across Vermont, on Vermont Public Radio and in YWP’s monthly digital magazine, The Voice. Since 2006, it has offered young people a place to write, explore and connect online at youngwritersproject.org, which has only one rule: Be respectful. For more information, please contact YWP executive director Geoffrey Gevalt at ggevalt@youngwritersproject.org.
Noa Urbaitel, Class of 2015 at Champlain Valley Union High School, has been writing with Young Writers Project since sixth grade. She is attending Mount Holyoke College this fall.
The Summer I Was 15
Noa Urbaitel
A tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed boy helped me hide it
underneath a blanket of shooting stars and beside some wooden cabins.
I’ve been searching for it for three years now
and when I tell him I can’t find it,
he looks at me with dark eyes, incredulous.
Don’t you remember? he implores.
We made a treasure map the summer we were 15,
wrote it against tongues and teeth beneath the summer moon,
traced the path with hesitant hands through hair
and marked the spot with love-stained fingertips.
I’ve been searching for it for three years now
and I’ll never forgive my 15-year-old self
for putting all my memories into my heart and hiding it,
for I have forgotten the words he wrote with his tongue and teeth,
and I can’t remember the path he made with his hands in my hair.
And for the life of me,
I can’t recall the spot he marked with love-stained fingertips
against my blushing skin.
I’ve been searching for it for three years now.
I’ve looked for clues in pictures and ink-stained letters,
in I love you’s and I’m sorry’s,
in Vermont and Maine and Massachusetts,
in the shooting stars and wooden cabins I see along the winding roadside.
Don’t you remember? he implores.
You trusted me to hold onto it for safekeeping
(that was your mistake, not mine).
I have it here,
inside my ribcage, next to my own.
I look at him with green eyes, incredulous.
X marks the spot.
And my love-stained fingertips match the mark I made against his heart
the summer I was 15.
